Craig Butt

The front fence is the brightest part of the property - a light blue barricade covered in cobwebs. A rusted letterbox with a “no advertising material” sticker is jammed full of letters. Overgrown plants block the way to the front door, which has been forced open revealing piles of clutter inside. A couple of years ago someone from the council pinned a note to the door, a neighbour says, "but it has since blown away".

It’s an unlikely starting place for a multimillion-dollar riddle. But it is here that the search for Australia’s greatest confiscated fortune - and the woman who once owned it - begins.

The man living next door doesn’t know who is responsible for looking after the house. It has been uninhabited in the three years he has been living in the street, apart from the occasional late-night visit from local youths. Someone tore the insulation out of the roof of the garage. There were eight storage drums here once as well, he says, but they were taken away by the council.

The drums are not the only things that have been claimed. The woman who once lived here also left behind almost $5 million, which now resides with the government - part of the $657 million in unclaimed money that now sits waiting in 272,660 bank accounts around Australia.

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The government currently swoops on accounts that have been left inactive for more than three years. Some of these amounts are tiny - 4577 accounts contain less than five dollars. Others are forgotten rainy day or super funds. Some belong to people who have long since died, while others to people who are very much alive.

Another mailbox. Watsonia, Melbourne, May 2013.

“It was just a standard letter, nothing private or confidential or anything,” recalls Bill Furniss.

The letter informed him, in legalistic detail, that, having not been accessed in three years, his bank account had been classified as inactive and claimed by the government.

This was not news Bill needed to hear. The 83-year-old had just spent time in hospital the previous month with heart problems and, to add to his worries, his wife, Beverley, had been diagnosed with dementia. Now his life savings had disappeared without warning, and he faced a morass of red tape to retrieve them.

“We had no phone calls, no talk with the bloke who set it up,” Bill says, “We had no indication the three-year limit was in place.”

“I let out a string of oaths and called them all robbing bastards,” he recalls.

In fact the government has been quietly claiming inactive bank accounts since 1959 and pooling them in the federal government’s own account, the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund. The argument is that it prevents “lost” accounts slowly being whittled down by bank fees, charges and inflation. The original owners still get paid interest on the accounts.

Former Treasurer Wayne Swan changed the threshold from seven years to three years in 2012, in pursuit of a budget surplus. As a result, the bulk of the $657 million held by the government has been seized since 2013, when the change came into place, a total of $363 million from almost 85,000 accounts.

The changed law has led to a flurry of disgruntled customers trying to access money that was previously theirs - or trying to navigate the intricacies of deceased estates now locked up by the government. Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s MoneySmart website helps people find and retrieve money that has been claimed, but more than half the $650 million in total seized by the government since 2013 is yet to be returned to its rightful owners.

About one-fifth of that money last year belonged to people based at overseas addresses in 132 countries. While most of these were accounts held by people in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Britain and the United States, some can be traced to addresses as far afield as North Korea, Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some will doubtless never be claimed.

But each account holds within it another account, that of the life beyond the bank balance - the adventures and misadventures behind the accrual of these funds, and of the efforts that led, at least in some cases, to their retrieval by their rightful owners.

One of the largest unclaimed amounts belongs to Sumarto Wonowidjojo, the brother of Indonesian cigarette billionaire Susilo Wonowidjojo, who had almost $1.3 million squirrelled away in an account whose address is listed as a hotel room in Crown Towers. Maybe he has forgotten where he put it.

Within Australia, many of the accounts belong to small entities - groups including the Gympie Brothers Old Boys, the Wyndham Amateur Swimming Club, the Gregory Benevolent Aged Widows and Orphans fund - while some belong to companies. The now demerged Cadbury Schweppes has almost $250,000 sitting with ASIC, and a defunct company called ‘Professional Precise Punctual Painting Decorating Maintenance’ has $158,000.

But tens of millions of dollars belonging to individual Australians have also been quietly separated from their owners, perhaps forever. Somewhere in Sydney’s Martin Place is a couple who may or may not be aware that they are missing almost $2 million, while in Elwood there is a man who has had one cent locked up for more than a quarter of a century. One of the million-dollar amounts is listed to an address that I pass every day on my way to The Age building. I have knocked on the door a few times, but nobody has ever been home.

Of all that money, the $4.9 million residing in accounts owned by the woman who once lived at this Highett address stands alone as the largest amount. Yet much of her life remains a mystery - as does the future of the estate she left behind.

Her name was Clara Erdstein. She was born in Egypt in 1936, the youngest of five children. The family fled persecution in 1955 and settled in Australia. Clara died in a hospital in Melbourne on April 8, 2009 and was buried in a Jewish cemetery four days later. Her death did not elicit a notice in any newspapers and her grave is unmarked. She does not appear to have had any children. Her mother left her the home in Highett, and Clara later acquired a second house in upmarket Caulfield North from her brother Noah. The documentation for the property transfer lists her occupation as “spinster”.

Early attempts to find out more about her proved fruitless. The man living next door moved in more than a year after she died, while neighbours and shop-owners at the other address tell a similar story. The local synagogue has no record of her. It is the same story at the Holocaust Centre. Other organisations decline to comment for privacy reasons.

But two doors down from the abandoned house in Highett lives someone who once knew her, even though she does not want to share any memories. “Just because we lived nearby doesn’t mean we were close,” the woman says. The two barely had any contact. They lived like strangers but, as the woman acknowledges, she and Clara used to be sisters-in-law. The woman was once married to Clara’s late brother Victor.

The woman says still gets calls from the energy company about Clara’s unpaid electricity bills, perhaps, she believes, because they share the same surname. But to her Clara was “a long-lost relative”.

From the perspective of many observers, however, the most noteworthy thing about Clara might be what she left behind, a $5 million fortune and two properties with a combined value of about $1.75 million.

Certainly it is a lot more than what was taken from Bill Furniss last year. Bill says the five-digit sum in that bank account would not be much to some people. But to him it was his life savings, the culmination of more than 50 years of hard work.

He had entered the workforce at age 13, leaving school to work as a shoemaker’s apprentice in Albury. At this first job he earned 16 shillings a week, the equivalent of $1.60 today, but he doubts any of the money he made there would have percolated down to life savings. “In those days we spent it as soon as we got it,” he says.

That all changed when he met Beverley, married and settled down. The two had five children and moved down to Burwood so he could work in a shoe factory. He spent 13 years there before the place closed, so he went and worked in a factory producing sporting gear before finally ending up in sheet metal production.

“We didn’t get a lot but we managed. What we could save we did,” he says. “We put a little away, sometimes we had to scrape to make ends meet.”

On his 70th birthday in 2000 he retired. Beverley decided to follow suit and the two moved to Watsonia, in Melbourne’s north.

Furniss had been using the interest earned on the account to supplement his income and rarely withdrew anything from it, intending to keep the funds to one side in case he needed it to pay for any medical expenses.

It may not have been a fortune, but it was an account of a life well lived.

The only account of Clara from when she was alive comes from her executor, Caulfield lawyer Norman Rosenbaum, who says he has been in discussion with the bank about the $5 million.

He says he knew Clara for more than 30 years and while he cannot recall how they met, he remembers her as a fiercely intelligent and well-read woman. She was very private and almost reserved, he says, and he believes she once worked as a para-legal. But the main trait he recalls is her dedication to her brother Noah. He says they were virtually inseparable. They were also estranged from other family members. It was something she refused to ever discuss.

When Noah’s health began to fail, the two moved in together at his Caulfield North home - which he later transferred to her - so she could care for him. When he ended up in hospital, she would spend her days there with him, says Rosenbaum. Noah could no longer speak, but she would read to him, bring in tapes and music, and take him outside.

Then she too became ill and ended up in hospital herself, unable to visit or tend to Noah. Rosenbaum says he managed to arrange for Noah to visit his sister, just once. “Her whole face just lit up,” he says. It was the last time the two spent any time together. Clara had a heart attack on the eve of Passover in 2009 and died later that evening. Noah died about a year later.

Rosenbaum will not discuss details of Clara’s estate or possible beneficiaries. He says he is trying to get the money back - a process he says has been further complicated by his own ill health.

But getting it back can be an arduous process, as Bill Furniss found out. He describes lengthy games of “phone ping-pong” and trips down to the local bank branch offices to speak with managers who were unaware of the new rules surrounding inactive accounts.

His son-in-law Gary is convinced the strain contributed to Bill ending up in hospital again with more heart problems. Bill had wanted to take a holiday and go fishing, but the uncertainty around whether he would get his money back confined him to Watsonia.

Bill believes strong family ties are what helped him get the money back. Gary, with whom he shares the Watsonia house, helped with the inquiries - without it Bill says he would have been lost.

Even then, it took five months before his life savings, plus interest, were returned to him. This time there was no letter. Just a surprise at the ATM. After withdrawing money last October, he picked up his receipt and found a few more zeros than he had been expecting.

“Oh shit!” he said, surprised, “ I’ve got all this money now.”

Then he remembered whose it was. “My money.”

Clara’s money may well reside with the government for a while longer.

ASIC confirms claims from executors can take longer to process and can be complex to sort out. The sheer number of accounts now claimed has created a lot of work for them too, which could prolong matters. It has also made extra work for the banks, who have lobbied for things to go back to how they were. The Treasury department put out a discussion paper in May, in which Finance Minister Mathias Cormann flagged changing the time it takes for an account to be classified as inactive to five or seven years.

None of which is likely to matter to Clara now.

She and Noah are buried side by side at the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha cemetery in Lyndhurst, in Melbourne’s south-east. Their brother Victor resides in a separate section. Most of the graves conform to a similar style, with an epitaph on the front and the surname engraved on the back. Amidst all these graves, Clara’s and Noah’s stand out.

Their headstones are unmarked, blank slates amongst the rows of inscribed graves in the cemetery. But perhaps they have not been forgotten - several white pebbles have been left at the base. In Jewish custom, mourners leave these stones instead of flowers.

Perhaps someone is out there. Someone who cares. Could that someone be entitled to almost $5 million?